KARACHI: Gunmen disguised as Pakistani security officials killed at least 14 passengers, including personnel of the navy, early morning on Thursday after forcing them off buses traveling between the financial hub of Karachi and the coastal town of Gwadar, the government and the navy said.
The assault in southwestern Baluchistan comes less than a week after a suicide bomb ripped through an outdoor market in the province, killing at least 20 people, half of them from the ethnic Hazaras Shia minority.
“Fourteen people have been martyred by terrorists near Buzi Top on the [Makran] Coastal Highway,” a spokesperson for the Pakistan Navy told Arab News. “The martyrs also include personnel of the Pakistan Navy.”
Thursday’s attack is one in a long line of such attacks in Balochistan, many of them carried out by Taliban and sectarian militants against minorities, and some by Baloch separatists against what are termed “settlers” from other parts of Pakistan, particularly Punjab, the country’s most populous and richest province.
Local tv channels and social media posts said Baloch Raji Aajoi Sangar (BRAS), an umbrella group formed by three separatist groups, the Balochistan Liberation Front, the Balochistan Liberation Army and Baloch Republican Guards, had claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement.
“Those who were targeted carried [identification] cards of the Pakistan Navy and Coast Guards, and they were only killed after they were identified,” local media quoted the BRAS statement as saying.
Prime Minister Imran Khan condemned Thursday’s attack in a statement released by his office and “directed the authorities to make every possible effort to identify and to bring the perpetrators of the barbaric act to justice.”
Balochistan’s Information Minister Zahoor Ahmed Buledi told Arab News around 50 gunmen wearing uniforms of the paramilitary Frontier Corps stopped at least three buses in the Buzi Top area on the Makran coastal highway.
“They [terrorists] offloaded the passengers and took aside sixteen passengers with addresses of Punjab province on their national identity cards,” Buledi said. “They gunned down fourteen whereas two managed to escape.”
The bodies of all fourteen people killed have been shifted to a navy hospital in Ormara, the minister said, adding that the identities of the deceased were yet to be confirmed.
“Heartless terrorists have crossed all limits of barbarity by killing innocent passengers,” Balochistan chief minister Jam Kamal Khan said in a statement. “The terrorists will be brought to the book.”
